This book focuses on Ireland’s lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation’s fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-Twentieth Century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name.

Rachael Sealy Lynch, Associate Professor Emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, USA, works primarily in the field of recent and contemporary Irish women writers, and, more recently, in the medical humanities. She has published widely, with a focus on sex, stigma, and shame, on writers including Anne Enright, Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, Edna O’Brien, Emma Donoghue, Mary Lavin, and Liam O’Flaherty.